Guest post by Natalie Tealdi…
You’ve put your heart and soul into creating your book and at last, it’s complete! Congratulations! Now it’s time to get it out there and showcase it to the world! Of course, you want your book to sell but using digital marketing tools is also a great way to engage and build relationships with your readers. (Please note we are not affiliated with any of the services below.)
There are so many digital marketing tools – which ones should I use?
It’s a bit of a minefield out there and it can be hard to know which tools are the best to use. Here are some of our favourites which will help propel your book to reach the audience it deserves:
Amazon’s Author Central is a FREE service that allows you as an author to communicate information about yourself and your books with your readers. You can use this space for the promotion of your books and to reach more readers. Here’s an example of James Nicol’s page.
When you sign up you have an author page which includes a profile photo, a biography, and a bibliography that you can view and edit as you wish.
To be eligible to join you have to be an author with a book listed in the Amazon catalogue. Then you can sign up for the service here using your Amazon account.
Communicate with your readers via email newsletters – trust us, they would LOVE to hear from you
As an author, you’ll want to communicate with your readers and one of the best ways to do this is via email newsletters. Using MailChimp you can create email templates and also use it to manage your all-important mailing list. And the best thing is, it’s absolutely FREE!
The email templates are professional-looking and so easy to use. You can just drag and drop your content, you can edit images and play around with the layout until you’re happy with it. It also has the ability to store your images and branding so that each time you do a newsletter, you have most things ready and waiting. Such a time-saver!
And if you’re panicking about hitting that send button in case there are any errors, you can send a test email before you send it to your mailing list. This is a great feature for ensuring the content you send out is just the way you’d like it to be.
It’s not all about the words!
Using images is a great way to engage with your readers. You may already use Pinterest but if not it is basically an online pinboard which enables users to share their content with the community. It’s typically used to share images of products you like, services you’re interested in and projects such as organising an event.
As an author, this is a great tool to post content related to your latest book such as the cover, locations that are mentioned in the book and photos of people who look like your characters, for example. This is a great way to really get your readers immersed in your fictional world.
Users interact on Pinterest by liking, commenting and re-saving each other’s posts and also via private message. It’s a really fun and easy way to connect with your fan base.
It’s worth keeping in mind that at the time of writing this, 80% of Pinterest users are female and the majority of active Pinterest users are under 40 years old. So do think about this in relation to your readership. If you’re promoting a children’s book, you might be communicating with parents so Pinterest can be a really good option for you.
Create adverts and images for social media posts that really stand out
Canva is a fabulous online, easy-to-use graphic design tool that you can use to create really professional-looking images for your social media channels and adverts for your masterpiece.
There are ready-made templates for Facebook and Instagram posts, posters, flyers and adverts. The best thing is you can use the templates and adapt them really easily to suit your own style. Once you know the basics, it’s so easy to create whatever you need, really quickly.
To get started all you need to do is visit https://www.canva.com/ You can then register for a free account, search for whatever design you’d like to create and off you go! You can even add in images of your book cover or images relevant to your book by uploading them. Once you’re happy with your design you can save it as a PDF, JPEG or PNG and then it’s ready to add to your Facebook or Instagram account, or wherever you like.
There are 3 different packages to choose from: Pro, Premium and Business. As an Author, the Pro account will probably be sufficient. This allows you to have up to 8 social accounts and you can schedule up to 100 posts per month. It is restricted to one user and costs $15 per month.
Readers love to connect with authors and using these tools should really help with this as well as the sales of your book. If digital marketing is new to you, you can do this! These tools are so user-friendly but if you need any help please get in touch, we would love to help you if you feel you could benefit from our services. We hope you enjoy using these tools to get to know your readers.
